Category Archives: Adventure games

A beginner’s guide to Elden Ring: what it is and why you should play it

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It is being hailed as one of the greatest games of all time, but if you don’t yet know your Margit from your Elden, here is a guide to get you roaming the Lands Between like a pro

Elden Ring has a Metacritic rating of 97%. If you type its name into Twitter you will be flooded with praise and anecdotes from players who have already spent many hours immersed in its arcane world. But what exactly is it? Why are people obsessed with it? And should you join them – or is it too hard?

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Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection review – victory tour for feelgood blockbusters

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PlayStation 5, PC (forthcoming); Naughty Dog/Sony
Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy get a joint re-release reminding us of the greatness of these bombastic action adventures

It’s been long enough since 2016’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End came out that I kind of miss Nathan Drake, the breezy, globetrotting, treasure-hunting star of the Uncharted series. In contrast to developer Naughty Dog’s other PlayStation series The Last of Us, a rather harrowing post-apocalyptic meditation on human darkness, Uncharted is a straightforwardly fun and light-hearted action-movie story. You never have to think too hard about what you’re doing or why, and as long as you can surrender your will to the game – for there is little room for improvisation in these climbing puzzles, shootouts and well-acted story scenes – you’ll have a good time.

Back then I was ready to see the back of Nathan Drake. His quips had started to feel predictable, the Indiana Jones setpieces of his global adventures – collapsing ledges, trap-filled tombs, cursed treasure – even more so. This game is a farewell to him, wringing a surprising amount of pathos from the cast and their relationships to each other (particularly Nathan and his wife, Elena, who share an adorable scene in front of a PlayStation in their front room in the opening hours that still hits just as well now). This series had run out of road, with no further far-flung corners of the world or secret character backstories to explore, and in retrospect it is easier to appreciate this as a victory tour for a developer that really mastered the blockbuster cinematic action game.

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The 10 best video games coming in 2022

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George RR Martin joins forces with the makers of Dark Souls, ghosts take over in Japan and a Nintendo sequel you could be playing all year

• More cultural highlights of 2022

(Xbox One/Series S/Series X, PlayStation 4/5, PC) The long-awaited fantasy epic from Dark Souls’ creators FromSoftware, with narrative input from George RR Martin. It combines a huge, detailed open world, inhabited by everything from dragons and wolves to trolls and patrolling soldiers, with the developer’s signature heart-in-mouth, swords-and-sorcery combat. An intriguing world to discover alone, or with other players.

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The 15 best video games of 2021

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Whether you’re driving a supercar through Mexico or simply unpacking a cardboard box in an utterly engrossing way, the year offered plenty of gaming joy. Our critics pick the top titles

A genuinely inventive tactical role-playing adventure that uses procedural generation to allow for player-created stories, all taking place in a fantasy world constructed from luscious papercraft set-pieces – like a digital board game.

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Subnautica: Below Zero review — life begins at minus 30

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PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PC, Mac; Unknown Worlds
Survive under the waves on a frozen planet in this freeform adventure where following the instinct to explore is the real goal

I’m planning a trip. I’m going to load my sea truck with provisions, pick a direction and travel as far as I dare before pitching camp on an iceberg. First up, I need to craft a compass; while I’m doing that, I might as well make a bunch of beacons to mark points of interest for later. I could also do with some sea truck storage compartments (you know, for all the beacons). I pin the recipes to my heads-up display and go for a dive, hoping to pick up some crafting materials, but as I explore deeper, the sentient AI that has taken up residence in spare bits of my cerebral cortex (don’t ask) notifies me that there’s something interesting nearby. Topping up my oxygen regularly to avoid suffocating as I crawl over unexplored parts of the seabed, I stumble upon an abandoned underwater science outpost and start picking through it for salvage and intel. There’s an interesting crafting recipe here… wait, wasn’t I planning a trip?

Subnautica: Below Zero is an underwater survival game where best laid plans, like my theoretical sea truck escapade, are often diverted toward interesting distractions. As scientist Robin Ayou, we descend on planet 4546B to search for her lost sister, Sam, but the more immediate priority is staying warm, fed and hydrated (and making beacons). Starting out from little more than an aquatic linen closet with a fabricator and a tiny storage locker, the early hours are spent scavenging for fish and scraps to stay alive and fashion basic tools. There is no combat, just survival.

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10 short video games to play with your partner (or housemate)

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From detective missions to prison breakouts, playful puzzles to cosy diversions, here are some great games perfect for two

As the long, boring Covid winter drags on and sitting in front of Netflix together has long since lost its appeal, video games remain one of the few social pleasures allowed to us. Though most of the best multiplayer games are online – meaning you need two consoles at home if you want to join someone you live with – there are still plenty you can enjoy together on the couch. Some of these recommendations are two-player games you can play cooperatively, others are shorter story-based games that are fun to play with company, and all will happily fill an evening or two.

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Cyberpunk 2077: how 2020’s biggest video game launch turned into a shambles

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Starring Keanu Reeves and hyped to the heavens, Projekt Red’s dystopian but glitchy romp has been pulled from sale. What went wrong?

Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most-anticipated video games of the year was released last week. A dystopian romp around a Blade Runner-inspired city, it had all the ingredients for a perfect storm of hype: it’s been nearly a decade in the making; its creator, Warsaw’s CD Projekt Red, was behind one of the greatest games of the last decade (The Witcher 3 – think Game of Thrones but grimier); it stars Keanu Reeves, who is as popular with gamers as he is with everybody else. Eight million people had pre-ordered and paid for the game before it came out. But since 10 December, it’s all gone horribly wrong.

On launch day, the reviews were good – great, even. Many critics praised the fictional Night City’s realism, its striking skyscraping architecture and grubby alleys; they loved the invigorating gunplay, ballsy characters and neon swagger. Some expressed reservations about the game’s rather adolescent tone and its eagerness to objectify women’s bodies – neither of which were a surprise to anyone who’d been keeping an eye on the game’s marketing.

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‘To say, I saved the world – that’s the magic of games’: Bethesda’s Todd Howard

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With a background including Elder Scrolls, Fallout and forthcoming epic Starfield, how does the acclaimed developer see games in the next five years?

When you’ve got a discography like Todd Howard’s, full of critically acclaimed games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, it must be hard to pick a favourite. But there is one game he remembers more fondly than anyone else does: the first he ever worked on.

“Terminator: Future Shock,” he says. “When [Bethesda] came to Fallout, people were saying, oh, you’re doing a post-apocalyptic open world! In 3D! But we already did that in Terminator. It’s an underrated game that not a lot of people played. I think Quake came out right afterwards, that might have had something to do with it, and understandably so … Future Shock was made with eight or 10 people and it did a lot of things that no game had done. I remember it got critiqued at the time, which annoyed me to be honest. But now the things it did are commonplace.”

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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla review: cloudy with a chance of mead halls

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PS4 and PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PC; Ubisoft
The weather’s as bad as ever, but this smart, inventive and witty open-world game is a veritable Viking feast of adventure

It’s been a wild ride this year, but you can always rely on Assassin’s Creed to lighten the mood. Let’s see what those zany historians at Ubisoft have cooked up for us in the excitingly named Assassin’s Creed Valhalla … Peterborough, is it? Norwich in the dark ages?

I have nothing against our beautiful cathedral cities, rolling plains and park-and-ride services, but after 12 months of Brexit, Covid-19 and forest fires, plus the cancellation of the Eurovision song contest, I was hoping for something a little less Tough Mudder from this giddy, quasi-historical, action-adventure series, which previously had us gallivanting around Atlantis.

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‘It’s cool now’: why Dungeons & Dragons is casting its spell again

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Thanks to the popularity of open-world video games – and Stranger Things – a new generation has rediscovered the communal pleasures of the 80s role-playing phenomenon

Not long ago, my sons, like many other preteens, were obsessed with Fortnite. It was all they played, all they talked about, all they spent their pocket money on. But one rainy afternoon this summer, my youngest took out the D&D starter kit we’d bought him for Christmas and began to study it. Some friends came round and they played for hours. Since then, they haven’t really stopped.

This is not an isolated incident. Originally released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons is having what we now call “a moment”. The company behind the game, Wizards of the Coast, which bought the rights from original creator TSR, estimates that there are currently 40 million players worldwide, with new starters up 25% year on year, as its popularity grows and rules are translated into new languages.

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